Women, feminism, and geek culture

I spent years building up a tolerance to linkspam (19 October, 2012)

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! | Free Software Foundation: “This Ada Lovelace Day, you can help to raise the profile of women in free software by nominating a woman for the Free Software Awards. Each year, the Advancement of Free Software award is given to an individual who has made incredible contributions to free software. There are plenty of women out there who fit the bill, and we need your help to make sure they will be considered for this year’s award.”

[Trigger Warning: sexual violence and rape culture, racism, misogyny, online harassment, suicide.]“Cultural scavengers”: Violentacrez, Reddit, and trolls | Are Women Human? (cross posted at Racialicious): “I’d argue that the real story in Chen’s piece is not so much the disclosure of Violentacrez’ identity as it is the culture at Reddit that enabled him – and the parallels to how our culture as a whole produces and consumes sexualized and exploitative images of girls and women.” Includes many excellent links off to related articles, including some previously linked here and some newer linkspam suggestions, in particular:

Gawker’s Violentacrez Expose And How ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ Predicted Geek Misogyny | ThinkProgress: “The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the titular demon hunter and her friends find themselves harassed by three young men, Jonathan Levinson, Andrew Wells, and Warren Mears, who call themselves The Trio. These characters are each an important example of three different and damaging kinds of views men can have of women, and what toxic and tragic things can come to pass when those different worldviews are conflated and intermingled.”

Why publicize your conference policies? Hint: it does 90% of the work for you | The Ada Initiative: “Anti-harassment policies aren’t about punishment after the fact, they are about preventing harassment in the first place. They educate everyone in your community, set the tone of the conference, and make it far more likely you’ll find out about harassment that does happen. They increase the variety and diversity of people at your conferences and widen the pool of talent to draw speakers from.”

RNFF Pet Peeve: “It’s a Guy Thing…” | Romance Novels for Feminists: “You’ve all read them, those lines in romance novels meant to explain away some difference or conflict between the hero and heroine. A girlfriend tells the heroine, “Don’t worry, everyone knows men hate talking about their feelings” when her new love interest won’t discuss last night’s disagreement.”

Paizo Publishing and Pathfinder – Half Orc Origins | Gaming As Women: “I recently had the opportunity to speak with creators of the Pathfinder RPG at Paizo Publishing, James Jacobs (Creative Director) and F. Wesley Schneider (Editor-in-Chief). The subjects at hand were: the inclusion of the forced-sex origins of Half-Orcs in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, and some of the art in the Pathfinder Advanced Races book.”

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She says that one way to do this is through creating and editing Wikipedia entries about inspiring female scientists past and present, and today the Royal Society (of which Frith is a Fellow) begins an edit-athon to do just that. One example of a glaring omission on Wikipedia at present, mentioned by Frith, is the lack of an entry for cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of UCL, despite how hugely influential her work has been. (http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/how-skilled-are-london-taxi-drivers-at.html)